"The penitential disease"
Are there diseases that originate neither in psyche nor soma?
There is a branch of diseases which doctors seem unable to come to grips with and which causes great impairment in the lives of people. To this branch belongs fibromyalgia (fibrositis), IBS (Irritable Bowel Syndrome), CFS (Chronic Fatigue Syndrome). I think that forms of migraine and vulvar vestibulitis perhaps belong in this category, as well. Not seldom doctors have a contemptuous attitude toward people with these diseases, and they tend to want to get rid of them. In Sweden fibromyalgia, a debilitating pain syndrome, was earlier termed "kärringsjukan", the "hag illness".
A common factor is that there is no cure, but sometimes psychotherapeutic techniques can have an alleviating effect, and sometimes somatic therapies can alleviate the symptoms, for a while. Also controversial therapies, like acupuncture or hypnosis, can have a certain effect in individual cases. Not seldom the symptoms are so grave that people's lives are virtually destroyed. They cannot lead active lives, but must accept a disability pension.
Research seems unable to find a cause, whether somatic or psychosomatic. For instance, IBS patients don't generally seem neurotic. In fact, not seldom are they quite harmonic. So the psychotherapists seem equally powerless as the somatic doctors. IBS sufferers don't generally fit in a psychoneurotic category, and therefore researchers today focus on bodily research, but so far without much success. So how about accepting what reality tells us, then? What if there simply is no psychic cause, nor a somatic cause? Virus and bacteria aren't involved, either.
We sometimes find it hard to accept the findings of research, also in the physical science. The Michelson-Morley experiment showed that, no matter whether the earth was travelling away from, or toward, a certain star, the speed of light hitting earth was exactly the same. This should be impossible as the difference ought to be 60 kilometers per second. The only one who accepted empirical fact was Einstein. No matter how you move relative to a light source, the light always approaches you with the same speed. He applied some high school mathematics to this, and the Special Theory of Relativity was born.
Likewise, we might finally be forced to accept the impossible in the science of medicine, too, namely that these illnesses are neither psychogenic nor somatogenic.
If it's not of the body or the psyche, then the illness must be of the spirit. Stigmatization is of this ilk. The stigmata replicate the wounds of Christ. There are people living today who suffer from wounds that cannot be healed. Not all find gratification in being elevated as religious saints, and those people suffer greatly from the handicapping wounds. In theological terms, I maintain that they are carriers of an immense suffering that remains in the godhead. This was also the fate of Jesus of Nazareth whose suffering depended on his preparedness to carry the full weight of the divine in earthly life. He encouraged his followers to do the same: "Place my yoke over your shoulders, and learn from me, because I am gentle and humble. Then you will find rest for yourselves." (Matthew 11:29)
Such a notion could provide us with a new dimension in medicine, similar to how the theory of relativity added a new dimension to space. Quite contrary to scientific rationale, theology and medicine coincide, something that will be hard to stomach for the average rationalist. The gist is the following. Many cases of fibromyalgia, IBS, CFS, and migraine, depend on the same underlying motif: the alleviation of the suffering godhead in the partial destruction of the individual's earthly life. It is a sacrificial theme, well-known in historical polytheistic cultures. The victim, by his suffering and death, pays back what humankind owes to the gods. It is a payback for the impairment that has befallen the gods in their great world-creating sacrifice, as explicated in Aztec theology.
What the Aztec priests were referring to was a central Mesoamerican belief: that a great, on-going sacrifice sustains the Universe. Everything is tonacayotl: the "spiritual flesh-hood" on earth. Everything —earth, crops, moon, stars and people— springs from the severed or buried bodies, fingers, blood or the heads of the sacrificed gods. Humanity itself is macehualli, "those deserved and brought back to life through penance". A strong sense of indebtedness was connected with this worldview. Indeed, nextlahualli (debt-payment) was a commonly used metaphor for human sacrifice, and, as Bernardino de Sahagún reported, it was said that the victim was someone who "gave his service". ('Human sacrifice in Aztec culture', here)
Analogously, in an early Hindu myth, creation takes place when the primal being, Purusha, allows himself to be dismembered. His eye becomes the sun, his head the sky, his breath the wind, and so on. In Hinduism, Purusha became a symbol of the acts of sacrifice that kept the cosmos stable. Blood-letting, and other sacrificial practices, still occur in Hinduism. Historically, the Aztec priest provides a graphical example.
Every day he must make sacrifices of his own blood to the gods, not only from his ears like the common people, but also by piercing his tongue to offer blood. On all the greater ceremonial occasions he cut the calves of his legs or pierced them with cactus spines, so as to have blood to offer to the gods. His foreskin was pierced by cactus thorns, and torn until his penis was surrounded by a fringe of strips of flesh from which blood could easily be taken. Naturally, this implied, and was meant to assure, a celibate priesthood. (Burland, pp.105-6)
Sacrificial practices, as blood-letting, self-scourging, the knocking out of teeth, and to make painful incisions and tatoos, occur commonly in human history. In Europe the Flaggelant movement practiced self-scourging with a spiked whip.
[The Flaggelants] established their camps in fields near towns and held their rituals twice a day. The ritual began with the reading of a letter, claimed to have been delivered by an angel and justifying the Flagellants' activities. Next the followers would fall to their knees and scourge themselves, gesturing with their free hands to indicate their sin and striking themselves rhythmically to songs, known as Geisslerlieder, until blood flowed. Sometimes the blood was soaked up in rags and treated as a holy relic. ('Flaggelant', here)
Can we find a common cause behind these practices and how present-day young men and women are cutting themselves, using razor blades or knives to wound their limbs and bodies? Personal sacrifice and suffering is a central theme in religious history, not the least in Christianity, whose focal point this is. However, in today's world the general population has lost contact with these strange rituals, and it has sunk back into our collective unconscious. Instead, we focus on our own well-being. My argument is the following. What was played out deliberately in historical cultures, in sacramental torture and blood sacrifice, and in the self-scourging of medieval penitents, is today lived out unconsciously via the penitence of mysterious diseases. It is as if reincarnation is again taking place, in all those suffering people whose lives are wholly or partly destroyed by diseases that are beyond the grasp of earthly science. Modern-day sufferers are unwittingly replicating the work of Christ.
What is amiss? If these really are penitential diseases that are on the increase, why must yet more human lives be destroyed? I think we are confronted with a mystery that transcends intellectual understanding. In order to grasp at its meaning it's necessary to depend on symbolic and ritual notions. But modern-day man is severely lacking in his theological consciousness. He suffers from poverty in the grasp of symbols, and is severely lacking in a symbolical and ritual understanding of life on earth (see Symbolic Poverty). Never in human history has the world seen so much worldliness.
Only the sufferers can motivate themselves to alter their consciousness to include the divine. The rest of humanity is too busy living their worldly lives. The suffering penitents who are unconscious must work to become conscious of their role in the divine drama, to realize their own ongoing penitential sacrifice, the very myth in which they are unconsciously taking part. That makes a great difference, to realize that they suffer from a holy wound that keeps bleeding, like the wound of Amfortas in the Parsifal saga, a wound that was delivered with the spear with which Longinus had once wounded the Redeemer. It is only healed before the sanctuary of the Holy Grail.
The notion of the "penitential disease" adds yet another dimension to the etiology of diseases, so it in no way contradicts traditional psychology, or somatic medicine. The new concept (or rather, the renewed archaic concept), which complements the old paradigms, is perhaps of great import. To be able to conceptualize the ailings of the patient, instead of groping in the dark, has a salutary effect. To formulate the causes of suffering, to create an image of it, has an healing effect, in itself.
It is possible to argue that this is not in fact a spiritual disease, but that it still belongs within the confines of depth psychology. But I don't think the patients have a psychological problem, I think they have a problem with the divine. In the psychology of stigmatics there is no inner urge to suffer and bleed. The theologies of many religions attest that the need derives from the divine sphere. The gods demand sustenance in the form of sacrifices delivered by humanity.
Conclusion
To reason on lines of "spirit" means that we take into account relations with the divine, in the way of theology. The sacrifice is a case in point. To sacrifice lifeblood to the spirit is such a central theme in human history so I wonder where it has gone today. Maybe it has gone into penitential diseases. Critics will argue that this is merely another way of explaining away etiological causes as "magical", simply because we cannot understand them. The problem is that the spiritual motif cannot be established as a scientific cause because the spirit cannot be pinned down. The wind blows wherever it pleases.
In religious history life was ritually sacrificed in the form of blood. Modern ways of sacrifice would preferably take the form of contemplative practices, or meditations on spiritual subjects. What was St John of the Cross (1542–1591), and other contemplatives, in fact doing? They devoted their alloted time on earth to contemplation. In this, they sacrificed "life" to the spirit.
There are people whose calling it is to perform acts of sacrifice. However, since modern man is lacking in ritual consciousness, this calling is not heeded. Still, the sacrifice forces its way through in guise of penitential diseases. Migraine can be associated with the crown of thorns, fibromyalgia with flogging, IBS with Longinus's lance, CFS with the impoverishment of crucifixion, vestibulitis with the sacrifice of sexual life, so central in all spiritual traditions.
I do not argue against the existence of physical factors, such as neurotransmitters. By placing an illness in a contextual frame, in terms of religious symbols, the illness acquires a meaning, which physical knowledge is unable to bestow. The Amfortas wound is an apt symbol of the penitential disease. Perhaps the wound can be cured with faith-healing, or by a renewed sacrificial zeal. It might, after all, be necessary to recognize a spiritual dimension of etiology. It is a hard pill to swallow for the scientifically minded because it presupposes the notion of an objective spirit, an autonomous reality independent of poetry and psychology.
© Mats Winther, January 2011
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